George Jonas: Writing on the wall for Gaddafi

For Middle East strongmen it’s a rare experience to have their ministers resign for policy differences. Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil’s resignation on Monday, still unconfirmed, may have given Colonel Muammar Gaddafihis first glimpse of the handwriting on the wall.

The reason his Justice Minister gave to QURYNA, a privately owned newspaper, was “the excessive use of violence against government protesters.” It made him the fourth official to jump ship in a 24-hour period, joining the envoys to the Arab League, India and China.

If the Middle East’s longest serving leader hadn’t realized in the past seven days that he was in the Middle East’s biggest pile of trouble, at that moment he may have.

On Monday, an Al-Jazeera report had the Colonel’s air force actually bomb protesters on their way to an air base. Bombing is a rather emphatic gesture even by tyrannical standards, demonstrating a complete rift between the leadership and the people.

Protests against Col. Gaddafi’s 41-year-old rule have been spreading from Benghazi to Tripoli.

With demonstrations reported in Tobruk, al-Bayda and Misrata as well, Libya’s powerful Warfla tribe has announced it is joining the protesters.

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If true, it signifies a lot. Such tribal decisions are rarely taken without a careful assessment of the likely path of the leaping feline — in other words, which way the cat’s going to jump.

Survival in the Arab world depends on placing your bets as late in the game as possible — preferably when the results are already in.

This augurs poorly for the Colonel. Even the smaller al-Zuwayya tribe, which needs to be more cautious than the Warfla, is betting against him. News agencies report al-Zuwayya’s tribal leader threatening to cut oil exports if the Gaddafi-regime’s massacre of protesters continues.

No wonder that when one of the Libyan strongman’s sons, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, in a TV address described as rambling, admitted “mistakes” by the Gaddafi-clan’s security forces but warned that further protests against his father’s dictatorship might plunge Libya into civil war, he seemed a dollar short and a day too late.

What’s going to happen? Will the protesters win in the Middle East — and if they do, will it be a good thing or a bad thing?

To optimistic observers, especially to eastern seaboard liberal-democratic types, the ouster of Tunisian tyrant Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January amounted to lighting a long fuse to blow up all tyrannies in the Middle East.

This notion was reinforced by the February toppling of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, with popular protests erupting almost simultaneously, even if not with the same intensity, in Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Pessimistic observers agree that the fuse has been lit, except the ensuing explosions aren’t going to herald something better, such as democracy, but worse, such as theocracy.

I believe the correct equation should be “Cairo, 2011 = Cairo, 2011.” While both pessimists and optimists observe, accurately, that with the exception of Israel, all regimes in the region are (1) autocratic and (2) Muslim, susceptible to both democratic lures and to theocratic pressures, they fail to note that in other respects they are quite different. Jordan isn’t Syria. Libya isn’t Bahrain. And none of the other countries are anything like Iran.

The question to ask isn’t “Will the protesters win?” The question is: “Will the protesters win if they do?” And the answer to that is another question: “Where?”

In Libya, if the protesters won, they probably would win. Autocracies are usually followed by neither democracy nor theocracy but another autocracy. Whatever follows Col. Gaddafi’s regime is likely to be better from the protesters’ point of view. Probably, though not necessarily, from the West’s point of view as well.

Bahrain is a different story. If the protesters won in Bahrain, they’d likely lose; maybe even lose big. So would the West. Whatever follows the kingdom, short of a true democracy, for which the chances are remote, is likely to be worse.

In Iran, the protesters would win for sure if they won, along with all mankind. There’s nothing more repressive and dangerous than the regime of the ayatollahs — Col. Gaddafihimself would be a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Egypt is a military dictatorship. Democracy may come to

it, but not anytime soon. The next strongman entrusted with the task of leadership by the Egyptian army may be less repressive, corrupt and nepotistic than Mr. Mubarak– or more. It’s a toss-up whether the protesters win or lose.

And so on, country after country. In Jordan, I think the protesters would lose if they toppled King Abdullah.

In Syria — well, let’s turn to former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, writing in The New Republic.

Mr. Halevy points to conciliatory remarks both by the Syrian President, Bashar Assad, and the Egyptian military brass in recent days. “Israel, post-Mubarak, has been confirmed by its two key neighbours from south and north as a vital bloc in the region,” Mr. Halevy writes.

Mr. Assad isn’t keen to rock the boat. It certainly shouldn’t surprise anyone to discover that Israel can rely more on the common sense of its enemies than its friends.